From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-08-05T13:48:48+09:00
Subject: Re: State of the Onion

On Monday 04 August 2008 22:25:35 Daniel Berger wrote:

> Can you say "Job Security" boys and girls?

Ruby is already flexible enough to cause that problem -- or have that benefit, 
depending on your point of view.

There just seems to be a general consensus that DSLs can work, if used 
judiciously. No one seems to have a problem with, say, Sinatra:

get '/' do
  'Hello, world!'
end

The only change here, I think, is that we can now do things like:

get /
  'Hello, world!'
end

Or, for the more Python-inclined, drop the 'end'. And that's a very basic 
example -- wouldn't it be nice if, when configured to use Haml as a 
templating language, we could do:

get /
  %h1.greeting
    Hello, world!

Ok, probably a bad idea to make this the default, as in this example, but you 
get the idea. Markaby is a cool concept, but at the end of the day, Haml just 
feels cleaner. It also makes the point for very tightly-defined DSLs with 
very odd syntax -- and this happens anyway, with Haml, whether or not Ruby 
makes it easy.

I do see a point for Ruby's approach, though, in that I can get reliable 
editor coloring, and I can, at a glance, and without reading documentation, 
have an indication of what's going on -- at which things are part of the app, 
which are part of the framework, and which are part of the language.